Invitation: Refugee Hack Vienna, 9.-11. October

Joining forces to help with the refugee crisis

We’re glad to announce that we’re partnering up with the hackathon.wien team to bring the community together for the Refugee Hack Vienna next weekend, on 9.-11. October.

The Refugee Hack is a two days and one evening contest where developers, graphic/web/UX designers, project managers and all other interested individuals come together and build software to help refugees either directly or indirectly. It will take place at the coworking spaces Stockwerk and Sektor5. The launch event will be on Friday evening, 9. October, at Stockwerk.

10 Free Open Community Tickets

There will be an admission fee of 10 Euros (as a contribution towards food and drinks at the event), but we offer 10 free tickets for both the members of Open Knowledge Austria and people who want to contribute, but can’t afford the entry fee.

The #GuteDaten team will join the hackathon with – of course – an open data project. You’re welcome to join us, or any other team!

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Our project idea:

Open Data for an Open Mind

We will raise public awareness for the current refugee crisis with the help of open data (open data = openly accessible, machine-readable data). Our project will encourage an informed public discussion that’s based on the actual facts and numbers rather than on misinformation and political propaganda.

We think it’s of vital importance of any society to be as open and transparent as possible, without compromising the privacy of any individual.

We will scrape data sets of interest on a national and european scale, analyse and interpret the data with help of visualizations. These data sets can be anything from development aid budgets, weapon export reports, data on (granted) asylum, unemployment rates, national budgets, and many more.

Our project will be helpful for data journalists and investigative journalists, transparency and refugee activists, for developers as well as for the general public.

This idea is part of Gute Taten für gute Daten (Good Deeds for Good Data), a project by Open Knowledge Austria that’s funded by netdiee.at. We will offer both technical and content-related expertise.

Whether you’re a developer, a designer, communications/ marketing expert, journalist, activist, with a migration/refugee background or none of the above – if you’re interested in the subject, please join us!

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The #GuteDaten team has already freed some data sets. You can download them from GitHub.

** We updated the starting time and location, the contact email and added the Facebook page for this event on October 7, 2015**

About Sonja Fischbauer

Graduated archaeologist, traded my shovel for a notebook to work in digital communications.
At Open Knowledge Austria, I engage in outreach and communication activities for various projects, with a special fondness for organizing hackathons.